thephoeron

Sure, rankings are meaningless to us. But they matter to children, who still being primates of little to no distinction from the animal kingdom, really like to keep score.

You know how kids are. They only hear what they want to hear. They sulk and throw tantrums. No reason for an adult to let it get under their skin. On the contrary, they look up to us, and need us to be solid.

Haha---it's fine. The internet makes everyone's life an open-book. Which place of employment do you mean, though? As a contractor, I jump around a lot; but I'm also involved with a start-up (but that's still running in stealth mode, so there's not much posted about it online). I have managed to use Common Lisp at nearly every contract or job I've worked at for the past few years though---once employers and clients became more responsive to it again. Even when the job didn't strictly allow it, I used Lisp for code generation anyway.

As to your clarification---yes, that was understood. I was more speaking to the general criticisms about my tendency towards mystical language, since that comes up fairly often. I would be more surprised if there was third-party material discussing Neuro-Occultism, TBH---the occult community at large dislikes it because I deny a metaphysical explanation; and most of the people in the scientific community that I've shown it to dislike it because it even deals with the problem of mysticism (much like Freud criticized the work of Carl Jung for the same reason). How dare I!

That being said, I have been making good progress this year on my adapted process calculus---I'm just putting the finishing touches on the BNF grammar, and then I can begin testing its logical consistency and writing proofs. Once it's finished, I'm hoping to be able to describe physics, quantized consciousness, quantum and classical computing all with the same notation. Fingers crossed.

This is slightly off-topic, but I think it's worth explaining that I don't have a "belief system", per se. I'm a deductive thinker (which I realize is weird for a programmer), so I find metaphor and allusion to be useful tools for explaining myself. Mystical language, in particular, is very rich, colourful, and goes hand-in-hand with Lisp culture, since the multi-paradigm nature of the language appeals to deductive thinkers. Obviously I have studied psychonautics and chaos magick in some depth, and I was particularly taken by the idea from these modern schools of mysticism, that belief is a tool, that can be wielded to consciously control your own mind, much like (but not exactly like) how a programmer controls a computer by writing software.

As for my own heavily transhumanist "system" of Neuro-Occultism, it's more of a philosophical framework---the basic premise is that all supposedly supernatural phenomena can be explained in terms of psychology, neuroscience, and the physical sciences; that only once you have ruled out the possibility that a supposedly supernatural experience is a purely psychological phenomenon can you begin to model a physical explanation; that the experience of supposedly supernatural phenomena are more interesting and powerful when examined in this light; and that even qualitative systems such as the human mind can be described quantitatively, by adapting research in quantum computer science and biological computation to the field of neuroscience. It's not so different from Cognitive Science, only it emphasizes that once you know that all belief systems are just paradigms, that the human mind can support multiple, simultaneous, even contradictory paradigms, and that your fundamental being is in fact a quantitative system, you can really start to put your brain to work. The problem lies with the fact that the language of the unconscious mind is purely symbolic and associative; thus, a mystical language is necessitated by the structure of our minds---even though a rigorous, mathematical model would be preferable in terms of the scientific method. Lisp, metaphorically applied to the model of the mind, brings us most of the way there.

The purpose of Neuro-Occultism is to develop such a rigorous, mathematical model of consciousness and being; and in so doing, deprecate itself. I see this as an essential aspect of the "technological singularity", both for the realization of emergent machine intelligence, and for the transfer of human consciousness to a computational system---because until such time as the human mind can be understood quantitatively, the singularity will remain science-fiction and fantasy. But then, even the idea of the singularity is a problem, a fundamental limitation of current consciousness that prevents us from seeing past the event horizon of this convergence of technology, biology, individual and social psychology; in order to both achieve the singularity and transcend it, we need to first transcend our own segmented and qualitative perception of self.

There's a lot more I'd like to say on the subject, but that would be a book of its own. Back on topic: I do realize that the heavy-handed mystical tone and Lisp proselytization currently present in the introductory text of LLTHW is useless cruft; I'm a passionate and excitable person by nature, but I recognize that it is holding back the work and interfering with Zed Shaw's methodology. Writing a book is an iterative process, and my effort has been focused on getting a complete scope in order to pump out solid, relevant exercises---so for the time being, I've simply marked the intro chapters as rejected/need-to-be-rewritten. I really hope it won't take me a few more years to finish this book though!

I've been working on LLTHW pretty much every day since LLTHW was first posted on HN, but as I said in my reply to austenallred, I'm still working on shaping the content, in order to have a very clear work-plan to follow as I write the exercises. I'm hoping that my progress will be more visible once I have finished scoping the content of each chapter.

You're right, of course. It's a little overwhelming at times, how much interest and attention this project has garnered---especially so early into the 2nd draft, where I'm still shaping the breadth, depth, scope, and direction of the content. The first time this project was posted to Hacker News earlier this year, I felt forced to push out exercises for the first two chapters as quickly as possible, just to give visitors some material to actually work with; but they do not yet reflect the final style and methodology that I'm aiming for. I do want to make it clear, though, that I'm not going to stop working on this project until it meets the standards set down by Zed Shaw for LxTHW-based books.

The most important factor, as I understand it, is the show-don't-tell method; it's also the most difficult to achieve for a language like Common Lisp, which is so foreign to most people. For the purposes of this draft-in-progress, however, just consider every explanation currently in the text as a placeholder for concrete examples that will illustrate the point better.

Another important factor is the pace of each exercise. One of the biggest features I noticed about Zed Shaw's Learn Code The Hard Way books is how perfectly he scaled the difficulty of progressive exercises, to maintain an even pace. For an absolute beginner to programming, an exercise should take no more than an hour to complete---and that's a goal I'm working towards for LLTHW as well.

To achieve these goals, once I finish laying out the content and direction with the intro text to each chapter, I'm going to be working backwards in each Part, writing progressively easier exercises, to make sure that all necessary material is covered, and that the pace is structured properly. But even once the 2nd draft is complete, I will still be relying on user feedback to adjust the ordering and pace of the material, as needed.

Thanks for your feedback, and I hope you'll continue participating in this project as I work out all the kinks!

Thanks for the link! I'm surprised that I have not seen this before.

The methodology in this book is definitely close to what I'm trying to achieve with LLTHW. I'll be sure to add it to the list of references, and look forward to what it can teach me about teaching Lisp.

Thanks everyone for your continued interest and support of this project as I work towards completing the second draft!

Unfortunately, it looks like the traffic spike has once again caused my webhost to kill and block the web application's process---so I'm going to have to move over to a better cloud service and an async web-app to better support this level of interest from the community.

I will announce the re-launch of LLTHW through my blog, which is syndicated on Planet Lisp. Until then, I do highly recommend Practical Common Lisp by Peter Seibel, also available online for free at: http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/

And it looks like my webhost is now automatically blocking the process. Sorry everyone!

Oh, yeah that was just the group for members of their developer program. It's gone now though.

Restarted the server, you should now be able to see the next three exercises... although there's very little to be seen in them so far.

It's worth noting that I don't work for D-Wave. Quantum Computing is an interest of mine, so naturally I signed up for their developer program when they launched it a couple years back (which they shut down entirely earlier this year).

Wow. The response on here has been amazing---yes, the criticism too. I was really shocked last night with the spike in traffic from Reddit, but I had no idea what to make of getting to the front page of Hacker News. TBH, I'm feeling pretty overwhelmed about the whole thing.

Just to put my two cents in, as a general reply to a lot of comments here... this is a very, very early draft in progress, and I didn't expect anyone to pay attention to this project, let alone post it everywhere. It needs a lot of work, particularly in toning down the Lisp Evangelism, and staying true to the methodology without accidentally parroting Zed Shaw's voice.

Zed Shaw: it means a lot to me to get your perspective here. Yes, you and your series ultra-inspired me. I've wanted to write a book on Lisp for a long time, but it wasn't until I was pointed to your series that I felt like I could give Lisp the perspective it was missing. I'll make a point of editing the Preface more carefully---everything that's up there so far, I wrote off the top of my head with very little editing, so I guess in following your method and format I accidentally used some of your words as well.

Thanks everyone!